Coral Gables mayoral candidates lob socialism, race attacks in final days of campaign
A political strategy deployed effectively by Republicans in Florida’s national and state elections has trickled into the Coral Gables mayoral race: connecting your opponent to socialist dictatorships.
Early this week, after mayoral candidate Patricia Keon’s campaign says her digital ads inadvertently ended up on a state-supported Venezuelan news site, opponent Vince Lago went on the offensive, accusing Keon of steering campaign funds to “the propaganda arm” of Venezuela strongman Nicolás Maduro.
A text message blast and bilingual Facebook advertisement sent out Monday and Tuesday from the Coral Gables First political committee show Keon’s face on a red background with big black and white letters that say “Pat Keon paid money to the propaganda arm of the regime of Nicolás Maduro.”
They also show a screenshot of a Keon banner ad appearing above a story on the news site Telesur, a Latin American network founded in 2005 by Hugo Chávez with the aim of being “a Latin socialist answer to CNN,” according to a Boston Globe article that reported on its launch.
“The political committee supporting me felt it was important to share with the community where Pat Keon has been placing advertisements due to the lack of sensitivity and understanding it shows toward our many friends and neighbors who have suffered at the hands of these regimes,” said Lago, whose own family fled Fidel Castro’s Cuba before he was born.
Keon, Lago’s main competition in a race that also features Jackson “Rip” Holmes, said the attack is “pure insanity and the effort of a desperate person.”
Her campaign says it didn’t pay for advertising on the news site. In fact, the campaign says it does not purchase advertising directly from any website, and instead targets voters using Google display ads.
“We have very limited control as to where these ads appear, given that billions of websites host Google’s display ads,” consultant Michael Worley wrote in an email.
The “socialist” line was employed by President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, and likely contributed to Miami-Dade County’s dramatic swing toward the right in the 2020 election. In Congressional races and other downballot campaigns, too, the GOP leaned into the message to reach Miami’s large immigrant and refugee populations from countries like Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela, where the leftist regimes of Maduro and Chavez had serious political and economical implications on their lives.
According to county election data, 48.1% of Coral Gables’ voters are Hispanic. About 43% of the Hispanic voters in Coral Gables are registered Republicans. Though the Coral Gables race is nonpartisan, Lago is a Republican and Keon is a Democrat.
With early voting beginning Saturday, the back-and-forth reflects a further departure by the candidates over the final days of the campaign from traditional City Hall issues like development and taxes in favor of identity politics.
Worley, who is in charge of Keon’s digital ad buys, wrote that Lago’s attack is “a baseless, desperate attempt to distract” from a Miami Herald story last week that revealed Lago was among dozens of parents who signed a letter that denounced a Miami Catholic school’s effort to address racism. Lago lost an endorsement and faced new attacks from Keon’s campaign after the story was published.
Stan Adkins, a consultant who is working on Keon’s campaign said the attack resembles “Miami-style gutter politics” that are “straight out of the South Florida Republican playbook.”
“When all else fails — call your opponent a socialist,” he said.
Lago punched back at Keon’s campaign Tuesday, saying they tried to smear him a a racist. On a Community Newspapers Facebook Live video, he said he will not stand for anyone calling him or his family racist because of the letter he signed to the school.
“This is completely and utterly politically motivated,” he said.